I thought that the new story content would be finished today. What was left was final play testing and balancing. During play testing a few issues popped up – one was pacing. The mission went a bit too quickly into a huge battle, I added a slightly smaller battle ahead and spaced out the subsequent battles more via timing. Then I got my butt kicked, which – by itself – not terribly surprising was surprising to the how much, it was a slaughter. The other aspect was that there is an optional “secondary mission” that needed some ships and that just wasn’t going to happen either.

So I thought about this and listed my options. The usual approach would be to tone down the attacks and reduce the number of enemies, but the fights felt really epic. So how could I keep that epic feel but give the player more tools for survival? The answer was more defensive platforms. So I whipped up a few more via Blender and modding/chopping up some existing ones to make variants.

Speaking of existing platforms – an earlier mission has the player dealing with defensive platforms that create mine fields, these shoot small but fairly fast moving mines. There’s also some bigger mines that I wanted to use here, but didn’t have an asset/method to get these larger mines into the game world. So I stumbled upon the idea of “building mine fields” like you build platforms/stations in the game. I don’t think it is too big of a stretch or immersion breaking, the method feels fairly reasonable and logical and about 30 minutes later it was in the game – easy peasy.

I hope that adding more defensive platforms, and this new “build a mine field” method only makes this mission more epic.